The Carbo is a new electric bike that weighs a mere 27 pounds and can pep up your morning commute. Created by the Montreal-based team that successfully shipped the Veco, this crowdfunded electric bike can collapse for travel and can go 40 miles with pedal assist and 28 miles on full automatic.

Early birds can get the single-gear bike for $1,199 or upgrade to a seven-gear bike for $100 more. The team has already hit their $50,000 goal and will ship in April 2019.

I saw an early version of the Carbo and was impressed. Although it looked thin and flimsy — the entire frame looks like you can bend it on a bad curb — it was very resilient and withstood my urban abuse. There are multiple modes, including Sport, which takes you almost immediately up to about 20 miles an hour with pedal assist, a great feeling. The battery is hidden inside the seat post and can be swapped out.

The bike seems like a good last-mile solution. Because you can collapse it almost completely, it works as a portable mode of transport similar to a scooter, but far more effective. As a fan of electric bikes, this thing really hits the sweet spot between price, portability and power.

While the price is a little high, it’s on par with other pedal-assist bikes and it should be considered legal in the United States when it ships because it does not have a full throttle system. Ultimately, however, this thing is about convenience and portability versus true power, so it’s worth looking into if you want a boost to work or school.

Two years after launching the original Hover, Zero Zero Robotics has returned for the sequel. In spite of landing a $25 million Series A back in 2016, the startup is going to the crowdfunding well on this one, launching a $100K Kickstarter campaign to launch the latest version of the self-flying drone.

Hover 2, which the company expects to arrive in April 2019, will feature updated obstacle avoidance, improved visual tracking and some updated internals, including a new Snapdragon processor on-board.

There’s a two-axis gimbal with electronic image stabilization for smoother shots that houses a camera capable of capturing 4K video and 12-megapixel photos. There are a number of different shot models on-board as well, including movie-inspired filters and music and a battery that’s capable of going 23 minutes on a charge.

Of course, Hover’s chief competition, the DJI Mavic line, has made some pretty massive leaps and bounds in practically all of those categories since launching the first Pro back in 2016, so the company’s got some stiff competition. Even Parrot has gotten more serious about their videography-focused Anafi line.

At $399 for early-bird pledgers, the Hover 2 is priced around the same as the handheld DJI Spark. That price includes a small handheld remote.

The FCC’s space-focused meeting today had actions taken on SpaceX satellites and orbital debris reduction, but the decision most likely to affect users has to do with Galileo. No, not the astronomer — the global positioning satellite constellation put in place by the E.U. over the last few years. It’s now legal for U.S. phones to use, and a simple software update could soon give your GPS signal a major bump.

Galileo is one of several successors to the Global Positioning System that’s been in use since the ’90s. But because it is U.S.-managed and was for a long time artificially limited in accuracy to everyone but U.S. military, it should come as no surprise that European, Russian and Chinese authorities would want their own solutions. Russia’s GLONASS is operational and China is hard at work getting its BeiDou system online.

The E.U.’s answer to GPS was Galileo, and the 26 (out of 30 planned) satellites making up the constellation offer improved accuracy and other services, such as altitude positioning. Test satellites went up as early as 2005, but it wasn’t until 2016 that it began actually offering location services.

A Galileo satellite launch earlier this year.

Devices already existed that would take advantage of Galileo signals — all the way back to the iPhone 6s, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and many others from that era forward. It just depends on the wireless chip inside the phone or navigation unit, and it’s pretty much standard now. (There’s a partial list of smartphones supporting Galileo here.)

When a company sells a new phone, it’s much easier to just make a couple million of the same thing rather than make tiny changes like using a wireless chipset in U.S. models that doesn’t support Galileo. The trade-off in savings versus complexity of manufacturing and distribution just isn’t worthwhile.

The thing is, American phones couldn’t use Galileo because the FCC has regulations against having ground stations being in contact with foreign satellites. Which is exactly what using Galileo positioning is, though of course it’s nothing sinister.

If you’re in the U.S., then, your phone likely has the capability to use Galileo but it has been disabled in software. The FCC decision today lets device makers change that, and the result could be much-improved location services. (One band not very compatible with existing U.S. navigation services has been held back, but two of the three are now available.)

Interestingly enough, however, your phone may already be using Galileo without your or the FCC’s knowledge. Because the capability is behind a software lock, it’s possible that a user could install an app or service bringing it into use. Perhaps you travel to Europe a lot and use a French app store and navigation app designed to work with Galileo and it unlocked the bands. There’d be nothing wrong with that.

Or perhaps you installed a custom ROM that included the ability to check the Galileo signal. That’s technically illegal, but the thing is there’s basically no way for anyone to tell! The way these systems work, all you’d be doing is receiving a signal illegally that your phone already supports and that’s already hitting its antennas every second — so who’s going to report you?

It’s unlikely that phone makers have secretly enabled the Galileo frequencies on U.S. models, but as Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel pointed out in a statement accompanying the FCC action, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening:

If you read the record in this proceeding and others like it, it becomes clear that many devices in the United States are already operating with foreign signals. But nowhere in our record is there a good picture of how many devices in this country are interacting with these foreign satellite systems, what it means for compliance with our rules, and what it means for the security of our systems. We should change that. Technology has gotten ahead of our approval policies and it’s time for a true-up.

She isn’t suggesting a crackdown — this is about regulation lagging behind consumer tech. Still, it is a little worrying that the FCC basically has no idea, and no way to find out, how many devices are illicitly tuning in to Galileo signals.

Expect an update to roll out to your phone sometime soon — Galileo signals will be of serious benefit to any location-based app, and to public services like 911, which are now officially allowed to use the more accurate service to determine location.

Crosley, makers of the “good enough” record players you see in Urban Outfitters and Target, have turned their retro novelty eye on the next obvious format: cassettes. These two new decks from the company have all the latest features from 1985, but also a handful of modern conveniences.

Let’s get one thing clear at the outset: these are certainly ridiculous. And yes, you can buy a boom box with a cassette deck right now, new, for $30 or so. But having browsed the stock I can tell you that most of them are pretty ugly. There are vintage ones too, but not all have aged well and may have unfixable issues like corrosion or motor problems.

And believe it or not, tapes are still around. People are manufacturing and recording on them because they’re fun and retro and analog. I’ve bought a few myself at shows in the last year.

So there is actually a market for a new, decent-looking, portable cassette player and radio.

The Crosley devices are pretty straightforward. There are two models; each has a big mono speaker, a single-direction deck (meaning you’ll have to flip the tape), an AM/FM radio and a built-in mic. The $60 CT100 model (top) has shortwave radio bands as well, and the capability to play music from an SD card or USB drive, while the $70 CT200 has treble and bass dials and a VU meter for easier recording of cassette-based podcasts. Both have handles.

Of the two I’d definitely go with the CT100, since presumably you can use the SD/USB player to record mixtapes of stuff you’ve downloaded. Record a little intro with the mic or pretend you’re the DJ between songs, and boom, it’s like you’re me in 1994. Plus you never know when shortwave will come in handy.

It’s silly, but it’s a silly world we live in. Silly and horrible. Maybe bringing back cassettes will help. Keep an eye out for these players wherever fake Ray-Bans plaid scarves are sold.

As I write this, I’m somewhere in Asia, with a bag full of assorted cables and devices. I’ve gotten better at packing light, but I’ve still got a ways to go. Certainly there’s something to be said for those products that can pull double duty — take the new Huawei phone or most recent iPad Pro update, all of which double as device chargers.

The Changer looks to be a clever take on the concept for the perpetually low on battery. The $89 yolked Bluetooth earbuds double as a charging cable. Snap the headphone bits off and you’ll find USB-C, microUSB and Lightning connectors.

The headphones sport a 12-hour battery, according to the company, and can be plugged directly into the wall. The cable can also be used to plug a mobile device into a battery pack or plugged into two different devices to share a charge.

I’ll admit I’m a bit skeptical about the efficacy of all this at this point, and the fact that its manufacturer, 49101, is opening up pre-orders through Indiegogo. The headphones are set to start shipping early next year.

If you’re planning on picking up some cool new smart device for a loved one this holiday season, it might be worth your while to check whether it’s one of the good ones or not. Not just in the quality of the camera or step tracking, but the security and privacy practices of the companies that will collect (and sell) the data it produces. Mozilla has produced a handy resource ranking 70 of the latest items, from Amazon Echos to smart teddy bears.

Each of the dozens of toys and devices is graded on a number of measures: what data does it collect? Is that data encrypted when it is transmitted? Who is it shared with? Are you required to change the default password? And what’s the worst-case scenario if something went wrong?

Some of the security risks are inherent to the product — for example, security cameras can potentially see things you’d rather they didn’t — but others are oversights on the part of the company. Security practices like respecting account deletion, not sharing data with third parties, and so on.

At the top of the list are items getting most of it right — this Mycroft smart speaker, for instance, uses open-source software and the company that makes it makes all the right choices. Their privacy policy is even easy to read! Lots of gadgets seem just fine, really. This list doesn’t just trash everything.

On the other hand, you have something like this Dobby drone. They don’t seem to even have a privacy policy — bad news when you’re installing an app that records your location, HD footage and other stuff! Similarly, this Fredi baby monitor comes with a bad password you don’t have to change, and has no automatic security updates. Are you kidding me? Stay far, far away.

Altogether, 33 of the products met Mozilla’s recently proposed “minimum security standards” for smart devices (and got a nice badge); 7 failed; and the rest fell somewhere in-between. In addition to these official measures there’s a crowdsourced (hopefully not to be gamed) “creep-o-meter” where prospective buyers can indicate how creepy they find a device. But why is BB-8 creepy? I’d take that particular metric with a grain of salt.

For example, in the video below a machine learning algorithm learned that it could rack up points not by taking part in a boat race but by flipping around in a circle to get points. In another simulation “where survival required energy but giving birth had no energy cost, one species evolved a sedentary lifestyle that consisted mostly of mating in order to produce new children which could be eaten (or used as mates to produce more edible children).” This led to what Krakovna called “indolent cannibals.”

It’s obvious that these machines aren’t “thinking” in any real sense but when given parameters and a the ability to evolve an answer, it’s also obvious that these robots will come up with some fun ideas. In other test, a robot learned to move a block by smacking the table with its arm and still another “genetic algorithm [was] supposed to configure a circuit into an oscillator, but instead [made] a radio to pick up signals from neighboring computers.” Another cancer-detecting system found that pictures of malignant tumors usually contained rulers and so gave plenty of false positives.

Each of these examples shows the unintended consequences of trusting machines to learn. They will learn but they will also confound us. Machine learning is just that – learning that is understandable only by machines.

One final example: in a game of Tetris in which a robot was required to “not lose” the program pauses “the game indefinitely to avoid losing.” Now it just needs to throw a tantrum and we’d have a clever three-year-old on our hands.

]]>https://extratechnews.fr/how-machine-learning-systems-sometimes-surprise-us/feed/0Alibaba made a smart screen to help blind people shop and it costs next to nothinghttps://extratechnews.fr/alibaba-made-a-smart-screen-to-help-blind-people-shop-and-it-costs-next-to-nothing/
https://extratechnews.fr/alibaba-made-a-smart-screen-to-help-blind-people-shop-and-it-costs-next-to-nothing/#respondMon, 12 Nov 2018 19:06:13 +0000https://extratechnews.fr/alibaba-made-a-smart-screen-to-help-blind-people-shop-and-it-costs-next-to-nothing/

Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who’s been blind since birth.

When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. “Though it was expensive,” Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don’t have good accessibility features.

Screen readers opened a plethora of new opportunity for those with visual impairments. “I felt liberated, no longer having to rely on others,” said Li, who can now shop online, WeChat her friends, and go out alone by following her iPhone compass.

Reading out everything on the screen is helpful, but it can also be overwhelming. Digital readers don’t decipher human thoughts, so when Li gets on apps with busy interfaces, such as an ecommerce platform, she’s bombarded with descriptions before she gets to the thing she wants.

Over the past two years, Alibaba’s $15 billion R&D initiative Damo Academy has been working to improve smartphone experience for the blind. Its latest answer, a joint effort with China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is a cheap silicone sheet that goes on top of smartphone screens.

Li is among the first one hundred visually impaired or blind users to trial the technology. Nothing stands out about the plastic film – which cost RMB 0.25 or 3.6 American cents each to produce – until one has a closer look. There are three mini buttons on each side. They are sensory-enabled, which means pressing on them triggers certain commands, usually those that are frequently used like “go back” and “confirm”.

“It’s much easier to shop with the sheet on,” said Li. Having button shortcuts removes the risk of misclicking and the need for complex interactions with screens. Powering Smart Touch is human-machine interaction, the same technology that makes voice control devices possible.

“We thought, human-machine interaction can’t just be for sighted people,” Chen Zhao, research director at Damo Academy told TechCrunch. “Besides voice, touch is also very important to the blind, so we decided to develop a touch feature.”

Smart Touch isn’t just for fingers. It also works when users hold their phones up to the ears. This lets them listen to text quickly in public without having to blast it out through speakers or headphones. Early trials of ear touch show a 50 percent reduction in time needed to complete tasks like taking calls and online shopping, Alibaba claims.

Emotions also matter. People with visual disabilities tend to be more cautious as they fumble through screens, so Smart Touch takes that into account. For instance, users need to double-click on the silicone button before a command goes through.

At the moment, Smart Touch works only on special editions of Alibaba’s two flagship apps, e-commerce marketplace Taobao and payment affiliate Alipay . The buttons automatically take on different functions when users switch between apps.

But Zhao said she wanted to make the technology widely available. Some tinkering with existing apps will make Smart Touch compatible. The smart film requires more testing before it officially rolls out early 2019, so Damo and Tsinghua have been recruiting volunteers like Li for feedback.

“Unlike with regular apps, it’s hard to beta test Smart Touch because the blind population is relatively small,” observed the researcher, but embedding the technology in popular apps could speed up the iteration process.

There’s also the issue with distributing the physical sheets. According to state census, China had around 13 million visually impaired people in 2012. That’s about one in a hundred people. However, they are rarely seen in public, as a post on China’s equivalent of Quora points out.

One oft-cited obstacle is that most roads in China aren’t disability-friendly, even in major cities. (In my city Shenzhen, blind lanes are common but they often get cut off abruptly to make way for a crossing or a bus stop.)

Damo doesn’t plan to monetize the initiative, according to Zhao. She envisions a future where her team could give out the haptic films — which can be mass produced at low costs — for free through Alibaba’s expanding network of brick-and-mortar stores.

Time will tell whether the accessibility scheme is more than public relations fluff. Initiatives around corporate social responsibility have mushroomed in China in recent years. They have come under fire, however, for being transient because many merely pander to the government’s demand (link in Chinese) for corporate ethics overlook long-term impact.

“The technology is ready. It just takes time to test it on different smartphones and bring to users at scale,” said Zhao.

It took about six months for popular consumer drone maker DJI to fix a security vulnerability across its website and apps, which if exploited could have given an attacker unfettered access to a drone owner’s account.

The vulnerability, revealed Thursday by researchers at security firm Check Point, would have given an attacker complete access to a DJI user’s cloud stored data, including drone logs, maps, any still or video footage — and live feed footage through FlightHub, the company’s fleet management system — without the user’s knowledge.

Taking advantage of the flaw was surprisingly simple — requiring a victim to click on a specially crafted link. But in practice, Check Point spent considerable time figuring out the precise way to launch a potential attack — and none of them were particularly easy.

For that reason, DJI called the vulnerability “high risk” but “low probability,” given the numerous hoops to jump through first to exploit the flaw.

“Given the popularity of DJI drones, it is important that potentially critical vulnerabilities like this are addressed quickly and effectively,” said Oded Vanunu, Check Point’s head of products vulnerability research.

A victim would have had to click on a malicious link from the DJI Forum, where customers and hobbyists talk about their drones and activities. By stealing the user’s account access token, an attacker could have pivoted to access the user’s main account. Clicking the malicious link would exploit a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw on the forum, essentially taking the user’s account cookie and using it on DJI’s account login page.

The researchers also found flaws in DJI’s apps and its web-based FlightHub site.

By exploiting the vulnerability, the attacker could take over the victim’s account and gain access to all of their synced recorded flights, drone photos, and more. (Image: Check Point)

Check Point reached out in March, at which time DJI fixed the XSS flaw in its site.

“Since then, we’ve gone product-by-product through all the elements in our hardware and software where the login process could have been compromised, to ensure this is no longer an easily replicable hack,” said DJI spokesperson Adam Lisberg.

But it took the company until September to roll out fixes across its apps and FlightHub.

The good news is that it’s unlikely anyone independently discovered and exploited any of the vulnerabilities, but both Check Point and DJI concede that it would be difficult to know for sure.

“While no one can ever prove a negative, we have seen no evidence that this vulnerability was ever exploited,” said Lisberg.

DJI heralded fixing the vulnerability as a victory for its bug bounty, which it set up a little over a year ago. Its bug bounty had a rocky start, after the company months later threatened a security researcher, who “walked away from $30,000” after revealing a string of emails from the company purportedly threatened him after finding sensitive access keys for the company’s Amazon Web Services instances.

“Who am I going to be worried about? Oh Facebook seeing? No, I’m not worried about Facebook seeing. They’re going to look at my great art collection and say they want to come steal it? No, I never really thought about it.” That’s my 72-year-old mother Sally Constine’s response to whether she’s worried about her privacy now that she has a Facebook Portal video chat device. The gadget goes on sale and starts shipping today at $349 for the 15.6-inch swiveling screen Portal+, $199 for the 10-inch Portal, and $100 off for buying any two.

The sticking point for most technology reporters — that it’s creepy or scary to have a Facebook camera and microphone in your house — didn’t even register as a concern with a normal tech novice like my mom. “I don’t really think of it any different from a phone call,” she says. “It’s not a big deal for me.”

While Facebook has been mired by privacy scandals after a year of Cambridge Analytica and its biggest-ever data breach, the concept that it can’t be trusted hasn’t necessarily trickled down to everyone. And without that coloring her perception, my mom found the Portal to be an easy way to video chat with family, and a powerful reminder to do so.

As a quick primer, Portal and Portal+ are smart video screens and Bluetooth speakers that offer an auto-zooming camera that follows you around the room as you video chat. They include both Facebook’s own voice assistant for controlling Messenger, as well as Amazon Alexa. There’s also a third-party app platform for speech-activated Spotify and Pandora, video clips from The Food Network and Newsy, and it can slideshow through your Facebook photos while it’s idle. For privacy, communications are encrypted, AI voice processing is done locally on the device, there’s an off switch that disconnects the camera and mic and it comes with a physical lens cover so you know no one’s watching you. It fares well in comparison to the price, specs and privacy features compared to Amazon’s Echo Show, Google Home Hub and other smart displays.

When we look at our multi-functional smartphones and computers, connecting with loved ones isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind the way it did with an old-school home telephone. But with the Portal in picture frame mode rotating through our Facebook photos of those loved ones, and with it at the beck and call of our voice commands, it felt natural to turn those in-between times we might have scrolled through Instagram to instead chatting face to face.

My mother found setting up the Portal to be quite simple, though she wished the little instructional card used a bigger font. She had no issue logging in to her Facebook, Amazon Alexa and Spotify accounts. “It’s all those things in one. If you had this, you could put Alexa in a different room,” the Constine matriarch says.

She found the screen to be remarkably sharp, though some of the on-screen buttons could be better labeled, at least at first. But once she explored the device’s software, she was uncontrollably giggling while trying on augmented reality masks as we talked. She even used the AR Storytime feature to read me a bedtime tale like she did 30 years ago. If I was still a child, I think I would have loved this way to play with a parent who was away from home. The intuitive feature instantly had her reading a modernized Three Little Pigs story while illustrations filled our screens. And when she found herself draped in an AR big bad wolf costume during his quotes, she knew to adopt his gruff voice.

One of the few problems she found was that when Facebook’s commercials for Portal came on the TV, they’d end up accidentally activating her Portal. Facebook might need to train the device to ignore its own ads, perhaps by muting them in a certain part of the audio spectrum as one Reddit user suggested Amazon may have done to prevent causing trouble with its Super Bowl commercial.

My mom doesn’t Skype or FaceTime much. She’s just so used to a lifetime of audio calls with her sister back in England that she rarely remembers that video is an option. Having a dedicated device in the kitchen kept the idea top-of-mind. “I really want to have a conversation seeing her. I think I would really feel close to her if I could see her like I’m seeing you now,” she tells me.

Convincing jaded younger adults to buy a Portal might be a steep challenge for Facebook. But perhaps Facebook understands that. Rather than being seemingly ignorant of or calloused about the privacy climate it’s launching Portal into, the company may be purposefully conceding to the tech news wonks that includes those who’ll be reviewing Portal but not necessarily the much larger mainstream audience. If it concentrates on seniors and families with young children who might not have the same fears of Facebook, it may have found a way to actually bring us closer together in the way its social network is supposed to.